Message In A Bottle
by beeftony
Summary: Before leaving Arcadia Bay forever, Max and Chloe have one last stop to make.


"What was it Einstein said?" asked Chloe, staring out over the pile of wreckage that used to be her house. "The only purpose of time is so everything doesn't happen at once?"

"It wasn't Einstein who said it," replied Max. "It's been attributed to Richard Feynman too. Best anyone can tell, it showed up in early science fiction and people started attributing it to any physicist famous enough to score them some nerd cred."

A half smirk tugged at the corner of her lips, and she side-eyed the girl next to her. "Look at you. Guess you really do learn things in school."

"I didn't learn it in class. Warren sent over a major reading list of stuff for me to look at when I pulled that all-nighter on Monday." Sighing, she leaned back against the bed of the truck where both of them were currently standing as they surveyed the ruins of the Price household. "That feels like a thousand years ago now."

"Well whoever said it, they were right." She gestured out with one hand. "Without order and structure, everything just gets mashed together into one big ball of chaos. My whole life was in that house, and now it's just… gone. Is it bad that I want to go digging through it to see if that stupid plush shark survived?"

Despite the gravity of their circumstances, Max chuckled. "A fallen comrade never gets left behind." She smiled and stood up straight again. "You always had so much trouble letting go of your old shit. Guess now the decision's been made for you."

"Yeah, same with this whole fucking town. Rachel always wanted us to leave, and I put it off for so long she died before I was even close to ready. I guess in a way, that tornado was her way of setting me free." She kicked a stray piece of rubble. "Fuck this place."

"You really think the tornado was Rachel's revenge?"

"I dunno. But it's all connected somehow. Maybe it was some Obi-Wan Kenobi shit. You know, like when she was struck down, it made her more powerful than anyone could have imagined."

Retrieving a shovel from the truck bed and slinging it over her shoulder, Chloe started towards the ruins, and Max followed close behind. The other girl's eyes narrowed, and she frowned in contemplation.

"This whole week, I kept seeing a spectral doe," she revealed. "First when you took me to the lighthouse and I got my second tornado vision, then when we went to the junkyard. It was standing right on her grave." She shook her head. "She was guiding us to the truth this whole time, and she showed me where we'd be safe from the storm. Maybe you're right: maybe we weren't meant to stop this. Just survive it."

Chloe grunted and they moved around the house into the backyard, where there was no longer a fence to impede them. A bittersweet smile remained on Max's lips.

"You know what I just realized? Every five years we come back and dig this thing up. It's almost becoming a tradition."

That succeeded in getting her favorite angry blueberry to laugh, and they both scanned around the yard. The swingset had been ripped in half, and presumably hurled into someone else's yard. The cardboard mural was missing entirely, and had either been sundered by the storm or blown away and left to the winds of fate.

But there was no debris in the yard, which suited their purposes just fine. Chloe planted the shovel tip-first into the ground, then leaned against it.

"Now where the hell did we bury it again?"

"That's actually a good point: _did_ you bury it in the same spot? I wasn't there to help you with any of that, and you had the funeral to prepare for, so…"

Chloe shook her head. "The hole was already dug, Max. I remember putting it back in the same spot. Right where we found it."

"Well we don't have a spyglass or our trusty ship anymore, so…"

"I know, I know, just… give me a second!" Her arms lashed out in a flurry around her and she clutched the shovel tightly, her back still turned. Max could hear her crying.

"Chloe…"

"Why do I care so much about a stupid time capsule when my mom is dead in that fucking diner?" She trembled, and her voice wavered as she continued. "Why take anything to remember from a town that stole _everything_ from me?"

She said the next words so quietly Max almost didn't hear them. "Why didn't you just let me die?"

"Chloe!" She surged forward, enveloping the other girl in a hug. "You don't mean that! I know this is hard, but that time capsule is all you have left of your dad! We're gonna drive out of this town and never look back, and we just have to live with the consequences!"

"But this is all my fault!" Her arms tightened around Max in a death grip, and her tears dribbled down onto her shoulder. "You didn't bring that storm to Arcadia Bay, _I_ did! _All_ of this is because of _me_!"

They separated, and Max reeled back. "No, Chloe! It's my fault! I'm the one who messed around with time so much that reality started falling apart, like a video tape that's been rewound too many times!"

"No, Max." She sighed deeply, calming herself and halting the flow of tears. "Do you remember what happened right before you got your second tornado vision? I said, and I quote, 'I'd like to drop a bomb on Arcadia Bay, and turn it to fucking glass.' I think Rachel heard me. I think all of this happened because I wasn't careful what I wished for."

"Do you hear how crazy that sounds?"

"Crazier than you getting time travel powers? I think we're well past pretending our lives are normal, Max."

"What difference does it make at this point? What's done is done, and the only thing I've learned from all of this is that trying to go back and fix things just makes everything worse. That's why I tore up the photo. That's why I couldn't let you die. Because you have _so. much_. to live for, so many things you could go on to achieve, and this place was sucking the life out of you. You said it yourself: Rachel wanted you to be free."

"But at what cost? What about all the people in this town who didn't deserve to have their lives cut short? What makes me so special?"

"I don't think there's a right answer to that," she said, her face going sullen and dark. "But I'm done trying to undo my mistakes. I just have to live with them like everybody else. Maybe that's the lesson I was supposed to learn."

Chloe scoffed. "Or maybe there was no greater purpose to all this and now our teen angst has a body count in the hundreds. How do you live with that?"

"I don't know. But even if I rewound to before it all happened, I'd still remember. And you would have died on the bathroom floor of a school you hated, never knowing what happened to Rachel. Never knowing how much I love you. You deserve better than that."

"Fine, whatever." She jerked the shovel out of the ground and stomped forward. "Let's just find the fucking time capsule."

"Right." She planted her hands on her hips and they scanned around. "I suck at remembering things."

"You remembered enough about Kate Marsh to stop her from jumping." She inserted the shovel into the ground in a random spot, hoping to stumble onto paydirt. "She's fine, by the way. The hospital barely even got hit, and there weren't any fatalities on that side of town. One small mercy, I guess. Kate's been through enough."

"Damn straight."

A bitter laugh escaped her lips. "You remember that one time we dug up holes in the yard for hours, searching for buried treasure before we got the bright idea of burying our own? Mom was so fucking pissed, but my dad said the grass had been dying anyway and he wanted to replant it. He could always find the bright side of anything."

She uprooted a chunk of soil, yielding nothing of value. "I guess the part of me that got that from him died the same time he did."

"But you're finally moving on," said Max. "That's what this is all about: closure. That's why we're taking the time to dig this up. I swear, there's gonna come a day when we can put all this behind us."

"You really think there's a future for either of us?" She planted the shovel in the ground, resting her forearm on the handle and staring at her with those bright blue eyes that had never dulled over the years, even though the world did everything in its power to snuff out their light. In spite of the sour, defeated expression on her face, she looked so beautiful in the morning sunlight. "We have no money, no skills, and no one we can turn to."

"My parents can take us in," she insisted. "Seattle isn't that far, and I wouldn't count either of us out in finding something to do with the rest of our lives."

Grinning crookedly, Chloe tested another spot. "I still like my idea of using your powers to go on an international crime spree. We already broke into Blackwell. How hard could it be to rob a bank with a human rewind button?"

"Chloe, this whole experience has been a lot of things, but my supervillain origin is not one of them."

"Yeah, yeah, it was just a thought…" There was a sharp ' _thunk_ ' as the shovel struck something solid, and Chloe began hurriedly clearing away the rest of the dirt, before they both descended to their knees and scooped out the mud with their hands, revealing their prize at last.

"Well, whataya know. It really is weatherproofed."

"Should we open it up?"

"Let's get it back to the truck first." Scraping of the last fragments of soil, Max hefted the small plastic drum and started moving, while Chloe followed behind her with the shovel. With a bit of effort, they managed to get it into the truck bed, then they both clambered into it themselves.

"Okay, let's see what we've got." Removing the top of the container, they started rummaging through, and neither of them could stop themselves from smiling at what they found. "Hey, it's the scratch art drawing I made for you. You think that jawbreaker survived the tornado?"

She recoiled briefly, then chuckled. "If you wanna go digging through the rubble to check, be my guest."

"On second thought, maybe we're better off leaving that in the dust. You find anything?"

"Just all the selfies I took that day. Man, we look so young in these."

"I wanted to preserve all the good things about that day," said Chloe. "To lock them up where I wouldn't be tempted to burn them all later. And believe me, I went through one hell of a fire phase. Rachel still got one up on me in that department, though."

Looking up from the photos, Max squinted with one eye.

"The first day I met her, she burned down Overlook Park. Her dad got a text from an unknown number earlier in the week, and she dragged me along so she'd have a witness when she caught him in the act. And when we saw him kissing another woman, it pissed her off so much she lit an old photo of them on fire and threw it in the trash, then kicked it over and started a wildfire."

"Holy shit."

"We found out later that the woman he was kissing was Rachel's real mother. He'd been lying to her for years because her mom got addicted to drugs and he paid her off to make her stay away." She chuckled. "You can imagine how he reacted to someone like me."

Her eyes narrowed and she stared past Max's shoulder, towards the end of the street. "When she started that fire, she screamed, and the wind screamed with her. And that whole weekend, the fire was burning out of control, but it never got close to Arcadia Bay. Then when she got stabbed by Frank's old boss, the fire went out completely."

"Rachel got _stabbed_?"

"Remember when Frank told us Pompidou used to have a bad owner? He was talking about a guy named Damon Merrick. Damon ran drugs and dogfights, and he owned the Old Mill where I met Rachel at an underground Firewalk show. Rachel's dad hired Damon to make her mom disappear, and as far as I can tell, Frank killed him over it."

Max leaned back. "Wow."

"I didn't want to think about this before, but that might be why Rachel took an interest in him. As scary as he got sometimes, Frank had a code of honor. I think he wanted to be a good person, but he was just… trapped in the role of a monster. She would have been drawn to that: something broken that she could try and fix."

"Do you think that's why she was drawn to you?"

"I think in my case it's because we were the same kind of broken." Her gaze traveled towards the time capsule. "I had a complicated relationship with my dad too. I was someone who could understand her, who could show her how to stop giving a fuck what the world thought of her. To stop pretending her life was perfect when inside she was… dying."

"I wish there was some way to save her. I'd really like to have met her."

"It's like you said. What's done is done, and all we can do is move forward. At least now I know she was watching out for us this whole time. You're not the only one who got superpowers out of all this."

"Speaking of which…" She stared down at the photos.

"What are you thinking?"

"I realize I can't stop any of this from happening," she said. "And with my photo rewind, I can only change a few minutes. But maybe that's all I need."

Chloe quirked an eyebrow. "What do you mean?"

"If there's one thing I could change in all of this without fucking up everything else, it's the fact that I abandoned you five years ago without even saying goodbye. I can't stop myself from leaving. But I _can_ let you know you're not alone. I can leave you a little bit of hope: something you can hold onto. One last farewell."

Reaching forward, she gripped Max's hand by the wrist. "That'll be enough. Even if that's all you can do, I can work with that."

She nodded slowly. "I love you, Chloe. And I promise I'll be right back."

"You'd better."

Max brought one of the photographs close to her face. It was a selfie taken in front of a mirror, with Chloe's reflection in the background. She focused hard on the image, until the borders of the world around her unraveled, and once again she fell backwards in time.


End file.
